blag-blag-blag...what's ya hiding?

A Hard Change Is Gonna Fall?

President-elect Barack Obama said Monday that he is withholding, for now, an internal review of his staff's contact with the office of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich at the request of the U.S. attorney handling the governor's corruption case.
Obama, speaking at a press conference where he unveiled his energy and environment team, said the review was "thorough and comprehensive" and backed up his previous claim that his aides were not involved in any wrongdoing.
"There was nothing in the review ... that in any way contradicted my earlier statement that this appalling set of circumstances that we've seen arise had nothing to do with my office," Obama said.
Blagojevich was arrested last week and accused of trying to auction off Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder, in a series of "pay-to-play" schemes.
Obama said he is waiting one week to release the contents of his review to the public. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald released a written statement Monday confirming that he requested a "brief delay" so that investigators could conduct certain interviews.
In personally disclosing the results of the investigation he ordered, Obama said, "As I said in a press conference last week, I had no contact with the governor's office and I had no contact with anybody in the governor's office. What I indicated last week was there was nothing that my office did that was in any way inappropriate or related to the charges that have been brought."
Obama's transition team said earlier Monday in a written statement that the review will show that Obama's staff did not take part in "inappropriate discussions" with Blagojevich over filling his Senate seat.
Obama said he was directing his staff to conduct the review at a press conference last week.
"That review affirmed the public statements of the president-elect that he had no contact with the governor or his staff, and that the president-elect's staff was not involved in inappropriate discussions with the governor or his staff over the selection of his successor as U.S. senator," Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said in the statement Monday.
"Also at the president-elect's direction, Gregory Craig, counsel to the transition, has kept the U.S. attorney's office informed of this fact-gathering process in order to ensure our full cooperation with the investigation," Pfeiffer said.
The brief statement, however, did not say whether Obama's incoming White House chief of staff, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, was heard on a wiretap providing the governor's top aide with a list of names that the president-elect favored. Nor did it say who, if anyone, on Obama transition's team had made contact with the governor or his aides concerning a replacement for Obama.
Obama, fielding questions at the news conference, sidestepped when asked whether Emanuel had spoken with aides to the governor about potential Senate appointees. Emanuel was one of several aides who watched the news conference from the wings.
Obama resigned his Senate seat last month to prepare for taking the oath of office as president. Blagojevich, who has the power to appoint a replacement, was arrested last week on charges he schemed to sell the seat in exchange for money or political favors for himself or his wife.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

change? dollars is more like it...

so, we've passed a historic threshold by electing a black man as president and yes that is quite a nice feel-good emotion and reality. Substance-wise, we won't truly know until history provides us with hindsight, although Obama's apparent charisma and stated sincerity have put many of these concerns at ease. After all, his election was by no means a grand mandate, but nonetheless a reflection that the country (well, 52% of it) did in fact find his rhetoric as believable, or least more palatble than what McCain & others offered. Obama definitely seemed sincere & 'presidential' and this worked to his advantage, especially during the campaign's ending days. While McCain seemed desperate and willing to vilify the senator from Illinois, Obama seemed a figure of cool composure & professionalism, in spite of his own party's attack ads & misinformation. Now that he is soon to take the seat of our government, we all must remember to stop patting ourselves on our backs for 'overcoming racism', and cast a scrutinizing eye to the White House. To be free from racial concerns, good or bad, is the basis of a good citizen, and we must as always watch those in positions of power. Sadly, as we approach January 20th, our new, untested president of change already has scandal pooling around his loafers. Obama was able to dodge William Ayer, Preacher-gate, and Tony Rezko during his campaign, although with effort. It is likely that these may again rear their heads and be heard; in fact, they already are. Obama's friend and colleague, the governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich has been caught trying to sell Obama's now vacant senatorial seat to the highest bidder. This is on top of strong-arming both a children's hospital and Wrigley Field into political donations, amongst even more speculation of wrong-doing. He was voted into office as an example of change to replace the prior corrupt governor and now we see more of the same scandalous behavior. Blagojevich seems now just another cog in wheel of old-time Chicago politics of paybacks & pocket-stuffing. It may have to do with the company he keeps. After all, he is a good friend of Tony Rezko, the slumlord, political fundraising kickback artist who has helped (& now hurt) the political life of both the Illinois governor and senator. As well, he is friends with Dan Rostenkowski, disgraced Chicago congressman, who was considered the symbol of Clintonian corruption. One wonders about such company and how close Obama is to any of this. Possibly not at all. Yet this in itself may not be a good thing, as ignorance of fellow Democrat politicians & fundraisers, as well as friends, shows poor judgement, at least. Keep your eyes peeled as "Change" becomes very greasy dollars.

Clinton's Confirmation May Spark Constitutional Battle:
A provision in the Constitution technically bars Sen. Hillary Clinton from becoming President-elect Barack Obama's secretary of state.
By Stephen Clark

The biggest obstacle facing Hillary Clinton's Senate confirmation as President-elect Barack Obama's top diplomat may not be her husband's wheeling and dealing abroad for his foundation, as many suspected.
Instead, it could be the U.S. Constitution.
According to an emolument clause in the Constitution, no lawmaker can be appointed to any civil position that was created or received a wage increase during the lawmaker's time in office.
President Bush ordered Cabinet salaries raised to $191,300 from $186,600 by executive order early this year, while Clinton was senator.
"My understanding is that does prohibit her unless they can find some way around it and I gather that they have in the past," former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger told FOX News.
"This isn't the first time this has come up," he said, referring to appointees of other presidents. "Maybe she has to renounce the salary increase but I'm sure they'll find a way around it."
The Obama transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Some constitutional lawyers don't foresee the provision derailing Clinton's nomination.
"I don't believe it presents a serious issue because the legislative fix which has been done in the past is perfectly constitutional," said Adam Bonin, an attorney at the Philadelphia law firm of Cozen O'Connor.
The legislation that Bonin referred to is the "Saxbe fix" that allowed President Richard Nixon to name Ohio Sen. William Saxbe his Attorney General.
The attorney general's salary was raised during Saxbe's term in 1969 but Nixon convinced Congress to lower Saxbe's salary to what it was before 1969.
The most recent case involved Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, who was nominated to be President-elect Bill Clinton's treasury secretary in 1993. To avoid conflict, Congress passed legislation lowering the salary of that position to its 1989 level.
Bonin believes Congress should pass similar legislation for Clinton.
"I think that's the safe move to make," he said, adding that he believes Clinton could be confirmed without a legislative fix because Congress didn't vote for Bush's pay raise.
Daniel Dreisdach, a professor of law at American University, said it would be difficult for anyone to use the provision to challenge Clinton's confirmation.
"In this respect, it's a bit analogous to this question of whether Barack Obama is a natural born citizen," he said, referring to a lawsuit, dismissed last month, seeking to obtain a copy of Obama's Hawaii birth certificate.
"Then it becomes who has legal standing to challenge his credentials as president or Hillary Clinton's assumption of the office," he said.
Dreisdach said as long as Democrats control the Senate, the Obama transition team won't worry about this provision in the Constitution.
"The Obama team is well aware of it and they have dismissed it," Dreisdach said. "I find it hard to believe that a Democratic majority will take a different view."

well people said he's a new Lincoln....

Small Change?

Obama's Cabinet Picks Heavy on Washington Experience
Thursday, November 20, 2008



WASHINGTON — For months on the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised to bring change to Washington. But now that he's president-elect, his first potential Cabinet picks indicate that he may bring more years of Washington experience to his administration than Bill Clinton or George W. Bush did.
Obama's first four likely Cabinet choices, including former first lady Hillary Clinton, have a combined total of more than 60 years of Washington experience.
By comparison, President Bush's first four Cabinet picks had a total of 30 years experience in Washington, and former President Clinton's had 58.
Obama has chosen former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle, a 30-year Washington veteran, to be his secretary of health and human services, and former deputy attorney general Eric Holder, a 20-year Washington veteran, to be his attorney general. His transition team is also reviewing Hillary Clinton, who has 15 years of experience in Washington as first lady and as New York senator, for the position of secretary of state.
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Obama's pick to lead the 7-year-old Department of Homeland Security, is a Washington outsider.
Obama signaled early on what kind of Cabinet he would recruit when he named Rahm Emanuel, a veteran of the Clinton administration and a fellow member of Congress, as his White House chief of staff.

Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, said he wasn't surprised that Obama would be relying more on Clinton veterans "who participated in a presidency that is viewed to have its accomplishments and was viewed as well run."
He added that Obama is entering a political landscape that is far different from the one Clinton faced when he was elected.
"When President Clinton came in, Democrats had virtually no farm team of executive branch hands that they could rely on for White House and Cabinet positions," Riley said.
In 1992, Clinton became the first Democratic president in 12 years, compared to the eight year-interval between him and Obama. Clinton also faced difficulty in picking veterans from Jimmy Carter's administration because Carter's four-year presidency was widely viewed as a failure, Riley said.
But Obama faces pitfalls when relying on Clinton veterans because he ran on a mantra of change, Riley said.
"The argument that Obama people would make ... it's possible to rely on people who know how the levers are pulled, but move it in a different direction than the last eight years," he said.
President Bush brought many Texans with him to Washington, but the ones who had the most influence on his administration were the Washington insiders, Riley said.
Bush's first Cabinet choice was his secretary of state, Colin Powell, who had 14 years of Washington experience, including a four-year stint as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush and President Clinton.
Bush's treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, had 16 years of Washington experience, including his work as the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, which creates the executive branch's fiscal blueprint.
Non-Washington insiders who were early choices in the Bush administration included Don Evans, a private businessman, as commerce secretary, and Mel Martinez, who had been a Florida utilities official, as secretary of housing and urban development.
Bill Clinton's first Cabinet pick was Lloyd Bentsen to be secretary of the treasury. Bentsen had 28 years of Washington experience, including 22 in the Senate. He also had been the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1988.
Clinton's other early choices included Ron Brown, a former head of the Democratic National Committee, as commerce secretary; Donna Shalala, head of the Washington-based Children's Defense Fund and a Carter administration official, as secretary of health and human services; and Robert Reich, a veteran of the Ford and Carter administrations, for labor secretary.
Riley said it's a good idea to appoint Washington veterans to positions that a president must rely on for so much.
Every president is "at the mercy of the people" he surrounds himself with, he said. "You have to have a good mix of eminence, people you can rely on and not mind being in a foxhole with."

what does "Change" mean...sometimes only pittance

Eric Holder, the long-time Washington lawyer chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to be the next attorney general, was a central figure in the controversy surrounding the clemency petitions of 16 convicted terrorists during the Clinton administration. Holder, who was deputy attorney general from 1997 until 2001, oversaw all of the requests for clemency filed during those years, including requests from former domestic terrorists, drug traffickers and a number of disgraced politicians.Most notable among the petitions for clemency granted during Holder’s tenure is the request from 16 members of a Puerto Rican Marxist terrorist group, the Armed Forces of National Liberation, known by its Spanish acronym FALN, which engaged in a robbery and terror campaign in both the U.S. and Puerto Rico during the 1970s and 1980s.
The clemency petition, which was supported by Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-N.Y.), Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) and Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.), became the subject of fiery controversy after it was revealed that none of the convicted terrorists had renounced violence and that their victims had not been consulted during the clemency process. The clemency petition was opposed by the FBI, the U.S. attorneys who had prosecuted the terrorists, and even the Justice Department’s own Office of Pardon Attorney – an office that was established to deal with the Clinton administration's overwhelming number of pardon requests.As deputy attorney general, Holder was responsible for overseeing the investigations of the individuals filing for clemency in order to determine whether or not their requests should be granted by then President Bill Clinton, who possesses the constitutional authority to grant pardons. A report issued by the House Committee on Government Reform on Dec. 12, 1999 states that senior Justice Department officials met with those who were asking for clemency for the terrorists, but the victims of the FALN were denied meetings. “Victims were unable to get meetings with the White House or Department of Justice,” the report said. “Some had tried to schedule meetings; they were simply rebuffed. Activists seeking clemency did get such meetings.”In fact, the report found that Holder met with the New York congressmen about the clemency petitions, once in November of 1997 and again in April of 1998. Holder also played a central role in drafting the clemency report that was delivered to President Clinton – one that gave no clear recommendation as to whether he should or should not grant clemency to the separatists; a position that ran against Justice’s earlier recommendations against clemency as late as March 1999.The congressional report criticized this ambiguous position, saying its reversal looked like the Justice Department was seeking to find a way to legitimize a legally suspect decision. “By refraining from giving a clear recommendation, it is almost as if the Justice Department is doing the best that it can to bolster a decision that had already been made,” the report said. The report went on to criticize Justice for apparently bending its own rules regarding clemency due to the politically charged nature of the requests.“It appears that the Justice Department has bent and even changed its rules to accommodate this politically charged clemency,” the report found.Holder, meanwhile, was also in charge when Clinton, on his last day in office, pardoned commodities trader Marc Rich who had left the United States in order to avoid prosecution for alleged tax evasion and violating the trade embargo with Iran. Rich's ex-wife Denise had visited the White House over a dozen times during Clinton's time in office, and contributed an estimated $450,000 to his library foundation, $1.1 million to the Democratic Party and more than $100,000 to Hillary Clinton's first bid for the Senate.

Letter to Luke

Luke,
From what I heard, read and understood is that Prop 8 passed b/c the gay community did not invest in & address the black and hispanic communities, which are traditionally very homophobic (usually more than whites). No matter how much money was thrown at it by the rich, directly addressing these two groups is what the gay groups have to do b/c it was where they failed this time around; and they would be the first to admit that. This is an example of the "fly over states" effecting CA policies, not the other way around as you first portended, but I think have since retracted.

As I said, progression happens, everywhere, at each regions own pace, but the question you have to ask is; weather or not human rights or civil rights are being suppressed or violated; and if you force that change what are the unforeseeable outcomes. Consider and nadir of race relations.

We might be emulating the UK economic systems (and even looking to their HC system). But people should really consider that they just might get what they wish for, and look real hard at what UHC means if we base it on any Euro country, Japan, Canada, etc. etc. There is a big price to pay for it, believe me. We are talking about a huge HUGE philosophical change in the US; gov rule over citizens rights; for better or worst, that is a huge change to this nation, in other words, kiss your 3K start-up tax break goodbye. We will have to become a nation of the babysat, not entrepreneur, free economy risk-takers. And there are pop. numbers to consider that no one is considering right now. If you worked for a Forbes Co. and proposed to your boss that, what worked for this small Co. should work out just the same for a Fortune 500 Co. you would probably be fired. You cannot just plug-in another nations' HC system and think that it would work here.

Look into to other nations HC system, honestly; look at the detractions and problems they are facing, and when and where there is a positive thing, ask yourself how is that situation is different here, apply pop numbers, immigration status, taxes, rights, demographics, national philosophy, national pride and communal centrality, etc. etc.

It's kind of like the Green thing; great! we're now on board as a nation to go green, I think that that is great; but now the realities set in (that liberals never, ever consider) that it is going to be a whole lot harder, extremely hard to implement a green energy plan than previously thought.

We have to think abstractly and be realistic if you want to really consider what would work here, and take the good with the bad. It's not easy, but I feel that it is needed now more than ever. The hard sell worked, we're on board as a nation on both UHC and green energy, now it's time to get down to work and lose the high hopes that was important to get us here, but have no place here now.

On a side note; I find it interesting that no one is talking about air travel and an alternative energy for that. Why? It is another ugly little secret that the greenies don't want you to consider; no air travel means global change to us all. What will the effects be? While the internet opens the world, the green revolution might be closing it. That means no quick trip home for the holidays for you all and the like, unless your boss will let you drive your hybrid car cross country and take another week or two off. Point being, there are a lot of interesting and major fallout’s for both the green thing and the HC thing.

By the way, you know I an a green conscience person so I don't think that some of these fallout's are a bad thing; hyper-speed bullet trains, clean energy nuclear trans-oceanic ships, are all good things, we just need to get there, and not be fooled by delusions of hope and empty promises.

I am working at a brick and mortal "start up," so I hope that you are right about that.

-Peace out,
-Chris

Hope for Change ?.....well........

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for White House chief of staff is one of the biggest recipients of Wall Street money in Congress, according to a Washington, D.C.-based “money-in-politics” watchdog group. The Center for Responsive Politics has issued a report highlighting millions of dollars in campaign contributions that Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) has raised from individuals working in the hedge fund industry, private equity firms, and large investment firms. Emanuel has raised more money from individuals and political action committees in securities and investment businesses than from any other industry. This comes after a presidential campaign that saw Obama frequently criticize Wall Street and blamed lack of government regulations for the economic crisis that hit the country in mid-September. Emanuel, a former Clinton White House aide, is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and received much of the credit for the Democrats winning a majority in the House of Representatives in 2006 – the first time in 12 years. For his own 2006 re-election campaign, where he faced no serious opposition, Emanuel raised $1.5 million from the investment industry. His other sources of contributions came from lawyers, who gave $682,900, while people working in the entertainment industries gave $376,100.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) (Though Obama did not accept contributions directly from lobbyists during his campaign, Washington lobbyists have given Emanuel $136,640 since he was elected. Emanuel is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which overseas tax legislation, making him “a popular industry target,” the report said. Employees from private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners contributed $93,600 to his various campaigns since he was first elected to Congress in 2002. Emanuel, who worked as an investment banker after President Bill Clinton left the White House, was elected to Congress in 2002. He has a net worth of between $5 million and $13.2 million, according to his 2007 financial disclosure form. Other top contributors to Emanuel’s campaigns have been employees of UBS, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, also financial sources for Obama’s presidential campaign.

oh, you...naughty UN

no wonder smart people worry about the UN

U.N. Reports Show Scrutiny in Short Supply at World Body -- but Reasons for it Abound
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
By George Russell

Nearly three years after the United Nations launched a highly publicized effort to crack down on fraud and waste, especially in its scandal-torn multi-billion-dollar procurement department, the clean-hands offensive is slowing down. And, its own watchdogs warn, other major areas of the U.N. bureaucracy are suffering from an alarming lack of scrutiny.
Two high-risk areas in particular: the United Nations Environmental Program, where more than $1 billion is being spent to control climate change with almost no auditing oversight; and the United Nations staff pension fund, where large amounts of cash are apparently being kept off the balance sheets, and where fund managers themselves decide what auditors can and cannot investigate.
Those conclusions are contained in a pair of annual reports that have been submitted to the General Assembly by the U.N. watchdogs themselves, known as the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS).
One of the reports covers the operations from July 1, 2007 to July 31, 2008, of the U.N.'s Procurement Task Force (PTF), which was set up in January 2006 to attack procurement corruption. The document also serves as an obituary of sorts for the PTF.
As the report notes, the task force is expected to disappear at the end of this year, strangled by lack of General Assembly funding. The task force will turn over more than 150 unexamined cases, including "several significant" fraud and corruption matters, to regular OIOS investigators, who may or may not be able to handle them.


The more damning document is a report on OIOS activities from June 2007 to June 2008 across the U.N., which is not limited merely to procurement. Its author, OIOS chief Inga-Britt Ahlenius, pointed out a number of U.N. "risk categories" that strongly hint that the scandals of the past could be repeated.
Click here to see the report.
In dense and understated language, Ahlenius highlights an ingrained U.N. culture of managerial laxity, confusion, bureaucratic resistance and, on occasion, spectacular incompetence that if left unaddressed does not bode well for the U.N.'s reputation — or probity — in the future.
Among the highlights:
• Poor data collection across the U.N. system means that in many cases "the determination of a program's relevance and effectiveness is not possible." OIOS noted that no methods had yet been devised to measure results-based performance across 25 percent of the areas mandated by the General Assembly in the years 2006 and 2007, the most recent available.
• Not illogically, OIOS also noted that according to various U.N. surveys, "whether or not results have been achieved matters little to resource allocation and individual performance assessment."
• The U.N. Secretariat's Department of Management, whose very function is to make sure the organization runs well, often makes things worse through its foggy and inconsistent use of the most basic U.N. terminology — which has been in use for 60 years. As the report notes: "Terminologies such as 'Secretariat,' 'Organization' and the 'United Nations,' which were critical to understanding the jurisdiction and scope of administrative issuances, were not always clearly defined or consistently applied by the Department. Consequently, the Department and other actors may not have a clear picture of their respective duties and responsibilities."
• Some of the U.N.'s most important funds and programs lack the auditing staff even remotely to keep track of what those programs are doing and how well or honestly they are doing it. The report notes that the United Nations Environmental Program has one auditor and one assistant to inspect its operations and a number of multilateral agreements under UNEP's purview. The OIOS document estimates that it would take 17 years for the auditor to look over just the high-risk areas already identified in UNEP's work.
• The same applies to the United Nations Human Settlements program, known as UN-Habitat, where OIOS estimates that it would take the solo auditor 11 years to cover the high-risk areas in a $250 million Habitat budget.
• One area of risk that is frequently mentioned is the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund, which handles the retirement income for all of the U.N.'s sprawling global operations. The OIOS report notes that the fund violates both U.N. rules and international auditing conventions by giving the pension fund management the right to sign off on the scope and terms of reference of any audit of the money. In other words, those being inspected get to agree on what gets a look-over, and how.
• The report also notes that despite the findings of previous audits, the pension fund is still keeping "excessive" amounts of cash on hand, and off the balance sheet — in effect as slush funds. The uninvested money reduces the pension fund's overall income. Moreover, the pension fund does not have a centralized sign-off on its financial statements, which could "adversely affect the reliability, consistency and integrity of the financial data produced by the Fund." Pension fund managers do not propose to fix the problem until 2010 or 2011 at the earliest.
Making a bad situation even worse, the report notes that the pension fund has inadequate information security policies that make it vulnerable to data theft and information security breaches.
• Perhaps the most bizarre finding of the report is the fact that the U.N. Secretariat's human resources department does not do criminal background checks on employees hired for less than a year. As of January, 2006, this amounted to 13 percent of the U.N.'s 10,985 staff members at New York headquarters and at the other major centers of Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi. The main reason given for the lack of criminal checks: lack of short-term staff to do the job.
To fix the problem, the HR office has only agreed to "perform an analysis to identify the risks of not conducting criminal background checks." But it has balked outright at conducting job history, education credential and job reference checks on prospective short-term staffers — because that would delay the recruitment of additional short-termers.
Even in cases where OIOS watchdogs have uncovered strong evidence of administrative malpractice, the documents show that U.N. top managers have been loath to take action. Ahlenius' report notes that OIOS successfully proved that managers of the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) had abused a $2.6 million trust fund provided by the Greek government, and recommended that the agency pay restitution to Athens. Then the report adds that "OIOS is still awaiting a comprehensive response" from DESA's top management.
Elsewhere, OIOS investigators report that three U.N. staff members were charged with misconduct in the Greek affair — but does not mention that in the case of at least one senior official, Guido Bertucci, head of the unit that administered the Thessaloniki project, the misconduct charge was filed only after he had retired. Bertucci has vigorously denied any wrongdoing.
Uncovering misconduct like the DESA case was the purview of the Procurement Task Force, which was formed after FOX News disclosed, among other things, that a U.N. procurement officer had been handing on confidential bidding information to U.N. suppliers and funneling money through a secret Caribbean bank account. Those revelations ultimately led to two criminal convictions and a sudden U.N. desire to attack what one auditor called a "culture of impunity" in the U.N.'s $2.6 billion procurement operation.
Since the PTF's inception, a team of 10 to 18 investigators has been kept frantically busy, examining an initial mountain of 437 cases, completing 222 investigations and ultimately identifying 20 significant fraud and corruption schemes involving contracts worth some $630 million.
In the latest annual report PTF says it identified five corruption schemes involving contracts worth some $20 million. These ranged from a $1.8 million scheme by U.N. staffers to steer contracts under a U.N. payroll review project to private firms in which they shared an interest; to a $350,000 husband-and-wife scheme to steer other contracts in their own direction; to the DESA trust fund abuse case.
Click here to see the PTF report.
Much of the PTF report, however, is devoted to the obstacles that were thrown in the investigators' path by vendors who refused to cooperate in providing information on their U.N. activities, allegedly corrupt staffers who complained that non-existent due process rights were violated, and individual suppliers who were able to set up operation as U.N. vendors under a different corporate label, even after their wrongdoing had been uncovered.
The PTF said it had recommended to the U.N's legal affairs office that contracts be amended to demand vendor cooperation, and that U.N. penalties against wrongdoing by suppliers target individuals as well as corporations. As matters stand, the PTF report says, vendors are not yet required even to declare whether U.N. staffers have an interest in their business. (The U.N. is moving to make some of the suggested changes.)
The biggest PTF roadblock is the General Assembly decision to cut off funding for the investigators, which means the unit will be disbanded at the end of the year. Typically, the cutoff was disguised as something else — a demand for further information that requires time beyond the limit when the Procurement Task Force is currently funded.
In her own report, OIOS chief Ahlenius says that she will seek to provide the information next year. In the meantime, she intends to integrate some of the PTF investigators into her regular staff.
But, as Ahlenius puts it, the result will be "serious challenges" for her watchdog organization — which already faces serious challenges in many other areas brought on by the U.N.'s accustomed ways of operating.

...dictator....

Jeff Jacoby

The 'dictator' label
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / October 29, 2008


IT HAS BEEN a favorite trope of the Bush-bashers: The 43d president's power-lust is so insatiable, his disdain for constitutional checks and balances so complete, that he has fashioned himself into a dictator. Crackpots can always be counted on to say such things, of course, but even non-loonies have played fast and loose with the D-word.

"In terms of the power he now claims without significant challenge," Michael Kinsley asserted in 2003, "George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world." When it emerged that the National Security Agency was sifting telephone records for possible counterterrorism leads, CNN's Jack Cafferty fumed that the administration intended to establish "a full-blown dictatorship in this country." In a piece for the Times of London, Andrew Sullivan informs us that "in war and economic crisis, Bush has insisted that there is no alternative to dictatorial rule."
Well, overwrought cries of "Dictator!" are an old story in American politics. Presidents great and not-so-great have been slammed as "tyrant" and "dictator," not to mention "autocrat," "Caesar," and "slavemaster." Somehow the Republic survived their administrations. Chances are, it will survive the Bush years too.
Bush as a ruthless autocrat? It would be easier to take the idea seriously if it weren't for the omnipresent clamor of voices denouncing the man. Tyrants have a way of squelching public dissent and intimidating their critics. Whatever else may be said about the Bush administration, it has never cowed its opponents into silence. If anything, the past eight years have set new records in vilifying a sitting president: "Bush = Hitler" signs at protest rallies; Crude "Buck Fush" bumper stickers; a 2006 movie depicting Bush's assassination; The New Republic's cover story on "The Case for Bush Hatred." The denunciation has been unending and often unhinged, yet Bush has never tried to censor it.
Will we be able to say the same of his successor?
If opinion polls are right, Barack Obama is cruising to victory. As president, would he show the same forbearance as Bush in allowing his opponents to have their say, unmolested? Or would he attempt to suppress the free speech of those whose views he detested? It is disturbing to contemplate some of the Obama campaign's recent efforts to stifle criticism.
When the National Rifle Association produced a radio ad last month about Obama's shifting position on gun control, the campaign's lawyers sent letters to radio stations in Ohio and Pennsylvania, urging them not to run it - and warning of trouble with the Federal Communications Commission if they did. "This advertisement knowingly misleads your viewing audience," Obama's general counsel Bob Bauer wrote. "For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement."
Similar lawyer letters went out in August when the American Issues Project produced a TV spot exploring Obama's strong ties to former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Station managers were warned that running the anti-Obama ad would be a violation of their legal obligation to serve the "public interest." And in case that wasn't menacing enough, the Obama campaign also urged the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation.
In Missouri, an Obama "truth squad" of prosecutors and other law-enforcement officials vowed to take action against anyone making "character attacks" on the Democratic candidate - a threat, Missouri Governor Matt Blunt later remarked, that had about it the "stench of police state tactics."
Perhaps these efforts to smother political speech are simply the overly aggressive tactics of a campaign in its adrenaline-fueled sprint to the finish. But what if they are the first warning signs of how an Obama administration would deal with its adversaries?
Michael Barone, the esteemed and judicious author of "The Almanac of American Politics," fears the worst. "In this campaign," he writes, "we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy . . . We may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead."
Pray that Barone is wrong. The nation's political life is toxic enough when the president is falsely labeled a dictator. It would be infinitely more poisonous if the label were true.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

Is that a white man's overbite?

Reprinted from The Independent (UK) October 21, 2008

Obama: Face to face with white America

If Barack Obama is to realise his dream, he doesn’t just need to win – he needs to win big. In the first part of a special report, Matt Bai joins him on a make-or-break campaign marathon through the working-class heartlands of the Appalachians 

For a guy who just four years ago was running his first statewide campaign, Barack Obama has made startlingly few missteps as a presidential candidate. But the moment Obama would most like to take back now, if he could, was the one last April when, speaking to a small gathering of San Francisco contributors, he said small-town voters in Pennsylvania and other states had grown "bitter" over lost jobs, which caused them to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them".

That comment, later posted by a blogger for the Huffington Post, undercut a central premises of Obama's campaign, an argument he first floated in his famous 2004 address to the Democratic Convention – that he could somehow erode the tired distinctions between red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) states and appeal to disaffected white men who had written off national Democrats as hopelessly elitist. Instead, in the weeks that followed, white working-class primary voters, not only in industrial states like Pennsylvania but also in rural states like Kentucky and West Virginia, rejected his candidacy by wide margins, and he staggered, wounded, toward the nomination.

"That was my biggest bone-headed move," Obama told me. We were sitting across from each other on his plane, the one with the big red, white and blue "O" on the tail, flying above Nebraska. "How it was interpreted in the press was Obama talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters. And I was actually making the reverse point, clumsily, which is that these voters have a right to be frustrated because they've been ignored. And because Democrats haven't met them halfway on cultural issues, we've not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition."

Obama was wearing his classic starched white shirt, with a tie the colour of a robin's egg. One on one, he has a crisp and effortless conversational style; his answers are thoughtful, but you rarely glimpse the thought process itself, the internal calibrations that every politician is constantly making. The only outward sign that Obama is labouring over his formulations is the way he will often elongate the word "and" for several seconds, a processing hitch that enables him to preview in his own head what he is about to tell you.

"I mean, part of what I was trying to say to that group in San Francisco was, 'You guys need to stop thinking that issues like religion or guns are somehow wrong,'" he continued. "Because, in fact, if you've grown up and your dad went out and took you hunting, and that is part of your self-identity and provides you a sense of continuity and stability that is unavailable in your economic life, then that's going to be pretty important, and rightfully so. And if you're watching your community lose population and collapse but your church is still strong and the life of the community is centred around that, well then, you know, we'd better be paying attention to that."

In a few minutes, Obama would arrive in Colorado for a campaign stop, followed by another in Nevada – two critical states that neither of the previous two Democratic nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry, came all that close to winning, largely because of their abject failure to connect with white men, especially lower- and middle-class men in rural and exurban counties. A few weeks earlier, I watched Obama campaign in the coal country of Appalachian Virginia, where no one I talked to could remember ever seeing a Democratic nominee come through town.

I asked Obama how he thought he could convey to these voters that he was not, in fact, an anthropological observer of the culture. Four years ago, Kerry, a man who was once actually pretty comfortable holding a semi-automatic weapon, donned his hunting gear and traipsed into the woods of Ohio, trailed by cameras, to shoot some geese. The stunt made him look absurd.

"First," Obama said, "you have to show up. I've been to Elko, Nevada, now three times."

"Elko?" I asked twice, straining to hear him over the engine noise.

"E-L-K-O." He sounded vaguely annoyed, as if I had just confirmed something about the media he had long suspected. "That, by the way, is the reason we got more delegates out of Nevada, even though we lost the popular vote there during the primary. We lost Las Vegas and Clark County, but we won handily in rural Nevada. And a lot of it just had to do with the fact that folks thought: Man, the guy is showing up. He's set up an office. He's doing real organising. He's talking to people.

"Number two is how we talk about issues. To act like hunting, like somebody who wants firearms just doesn't get it – that kind of condescension has to be purged from our vocabulary. And that's why that whole 'bittergate' episode was so bitter for me. It was like: Oh, this is exactly what I wanted to avoid. This is what for the last five or six years I've been trying to push away from."

As we talked, consequential events were reshaping the world below. At that very moment, Republicans in Washington were scuttling a $700bn emergency plan for Wall Street, causing the markets to haemorrhage more value in a single day, in terms of sheer dollar amounts, than at any time in American history and dragging the economy back into the centre of the campaign – precisely where John McCain and the Republicans didn't want it. And yet, what Obama and I were discussing, this cultural disconnect between Democrats and large swaths of white men, remained a lingering and crucial question. It now appeared that the only thing that could still threaten Obama's march to the presidency was the same resistance from these voters that had, at the last moment, dashed the dreams of both his Democratic predecessors. Gore and Kerry tried, somewhat dutifully, to prove their cultural affinity for regular white guys; when that didn't work, they tried to change the subject to policy platforms instead, hoping in vain that voters would just sort of forget about all that guns and church stuff. In both cases, that failure translated directly into defeat. According to exit polls in 2004, Kerry lost white men by a crushing 25-point margin.

Given the fact that he is not, in fact, a white male, Obama would seem to face an even less forgiving landscape among white male voters. While voters overall give Obama the advantage over McCain when asked which candidate is better equipped to navigate these tumultuous economic times, polls throughout the summer and into the autumn consistently showed McCain with a double-digit lead among white men who haven't been to college.

Yet Obama has persevered, devoting far more time and money than either of the last two Democratic nominees on an effort to persuade working-class and rural white guys that he is not the elitist, alien figure they may think he is. The Obama campaign has more than 50 state offices throughout Virginia, a state no Democrat has seriously contested since Obama was a teenager. In Indiana, there are 42 offices; in North Carolina, 45.

Mathematically, Obama can probably win the election without winning any of these states – or Nevada or Montana or any of the other conservative states where he has campaigned in the past several months. What he probably can't do, if he doesn't convert enough voters to throw at least a few traditionally red states into the blue column, is get beyond what he dismissively refers to as the "50-plus-1" governing model, the idea that a president need only represent 50 per cent of the country (plus one additional vote) to command the office. From the start, Obama has aspired not simply to win but also to stand as a kind of generational break from the polarised era of the baby boomers, to become the first president in at least 20 years to claim anything more than the most fragile mandate for his agenda. Absent that, even if he wins, Obama could wake up on 5 November as yet another president-elect of half the people, perched uncomfortably on the edge of an impassable cultural divide.

***

When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he famously predicted that his party had just signed away the South for a generation to come. In truth, the outcome was more profound than Johnson could have imagined. The culture war, whose Bunker Hill was the campus quad of the 1960s, soon spread to just about every region of the country, where rural and working-class white voters, already anxious over economic change, recoiled at the vehement strain of antimilitary, anti-Establishment liberalism that took hold of the Democratic Party in the era after Selma and Saigon. The effect, especially on the presidential level, was immediate and drastic. In the 32 years before Johnson made his pronouncement, Democrats controlled the White House for all but eight of them, and only twice – in 1948 and 1960 – had the Democrat won by what could be considered a narrow margin. In the four decades since, only two Democrats have managed to get elected, and only one has claimed a majority of the popular vote. (This was Jimmy Carter, who eked out exactly 50.1 per cent without winning a single state west of Texas.) By the turn of the century, almost completely driven from the South and West, Democratic presidential candidates had taken to focusing all their efforts on an ever-shrinking pool of coastal and industrial states.

Obama, though, has talked from the beginning about running a "50-state" campaign, and he has spent considerable time and money in more culturally conservative parts of the country where Democrats rarely, if ever, venture, from Elko and Appalachia to Billings, Montana and Las Cruces, New Mexico. To a large extent, this reflects Obama's personal conviction about modern politics, which he first laid out in his 2004 convention speech when he talked about worshipping "an awesome God in the blue states" and having "gay friends in the red states". He told me, when we talked, that Washington's us-versus-them divisions had made it impossible for any president to find solutions to a series of generational challenges, from Iraq to global climate change. "If voters are similarly polarised and if they're seeing two different realities, a Sean Hannity [conservative commentator] reality and a Keith Olbermann [liberal commentator] reality, then we're not going to be able to get done the work we need to get done," Obama said.

It is also true, however, that a series of circumstances beyond his control have conspired to make a truly national campaign more feasible for Obama than for any Democrat since Carter ran in the dark days after Watergate. First, of course, there is the national sense of despair over the Bush era, which has made the President more of a uniter than he ever intended and which has enabled Democrats to get a hearing in parts of the country where they were being run off the land 10 years ago. Then there's the advent of the internet as a veritable money vacuum, which has enabled Obama to raise more money than any Democrat in history, meaning he can afford to pour some resources into states he has only a remote chance of winning. Perhaps most important, though, Obama's campaign has also been able to take advantage of a drawn-out Democratic primary campaign that came through all 50 states before it was over – a draining experience that nonetheless established networks of volunteers and newly registered Democratic voters in states that in any other year would have been overlooked. In three states – Texas, Indiana and North Carolina – more people voted in Democratic primaries this year than voted for Kerry on election day in 2004.

For Obama's political advisers, expanding the electoral map is not about making a philosophical statement; it is simply a strategic imperative. Presidential campaigns, after all, are about getting to 270 – the minimum number of electoral votes needed to win. In relying on the same 20 or so winnable states over the past few elections, Democratic nominees have given themselves almost no margin for error. By contrast, Obama's campaign, in addition to fighting for the usual complement of about a dozen swing states, has shifted considerable resources into a group of states – the list has, at one time or another, included Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Georgia – that haven't been strongly contested for at least three elections, if not longer. (Alaska was on the list, too, until McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.) The idea here is that the more states you put in play, the more permutations there are that lead to victory.

"If you expand the map, you improve your chances," David Axelrod, Obama's lead strategist, told me recently. "We didn't want to be in that same dreary position where the entire election hinges on three states, and you stay up all night waiting to see who won them."

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Obama starts with the same relatively safe 19 states (plus the District of Columbia) Kerry won in 2004, and Iowa, which Gore won and where polls have shown Obama comfortably ahead. He could actually prevail without winning either of the two big perennial battleground states, Ohio and Florida, simply by winning Indiana by itself or by winning both New Mexico and Virginia. It is McCain, in fact, who, having earlier this month abandoned a foray into blue-collar Michigan, seems now to be facing the more restrictive map, betting on the notion that he can hold just about every reliably Republican state while also winning in battlegrounds like Florida and Ohio.

At times during these final months of the campaign, though, Obama's optimism about the impermanence of blue and red shading has run up against the hard reality that after 40 years of culturally divisive politics, colours don't easily bleed. Before the conventions, for instance, most polls in North Dakota showed McCain in front by only a few points. When I spoke to Byron Dorgan, the Democratic senator from North Dakota, last month, he sounded ecstatic about Obama's multiple trips to the state and the more than $400,000 the campaign had already dumped into ads there. "I think it's the first time you've turned on a television set and seen a persuasion ad for a Democratic candidate," Dorgan said.

Not a week later, a new round of post-convention polls showed McCain opening up a double-digit lead in North Dakota, and the Obama campaign abruptly pulled its ads. Dorgan called me back. "I do think this is going to come back to be a fairly close race in North Dakota, but I understand we need the resources in some of the other battleground states at this point," he said, sounding resigned. "I just called to say, 'Never mind.' "

***

The one state that no one expects Obama to surrender before election day is Virginia, which may be the most critical of what the Obama campaign labels its "non-traditional" battleground states, both symbolically and mathematically. Like North Dakota, Virginia hasn't voted for a Democratic nominee since Johnson beat Goldwater. (It was the only state of the Old South to go with Gerald Ford over Carter in 1976.) But the onset of the post-industrial economy has probably wrought more change on Virginia in the last 15 years or so than the state saw in the half-century before that. The new technology corridor running along I-66 in Northern Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, is one of the nation's most vibrant, and the self-sustaining exurbs growing up around it have rapidly transformed horizons of farmland into expensive town-house clusters and strip plazas. (The area now boasts such high-end stores as Tiffany, Gucci and Hermès.) New exurbs in the central part of the state aren't far behind, populated by commuters who work in corporate offices in Richmond, the capital of the old Confederacy. Of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the country, six are in Virginia.

The influx of new residents – many of them highly educated, some of them recent immigrants – has created in Northern Virginia one of the nation's more reliable and rapidly expanding Democratic voting blocs. In the more socially conservative south and south-west of the state, however, where manufacturing towns once thrived and coal miners once worked the Appalachian seam, the population has been falling steadily as high-school graduates strike out in search of stable work elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the number of statewide voters identifying themselves as Democrats has risen sharply over the last two years, far outpacing Republican growth. The last two governors have been Democrats, and come January – when Mark Warner, the former governor, is widely expected to replace John Warner (no relation) in Washington – both of its senators will probably be Democrats, too. John Kerry lost the state by nine points in 2004, but that was a relatively small margin when you consider that he never bothered to contest it. The McCain campaign is concerned enough about holding on to Virginia, where polls this month showed Obama pulling ahead, that it recently opened 10 new offices there.

Any Democrat who wants a general blueprint for how to win Virginia need only look to election maps from the last few statewide elections, in which the voters narrowly installed Tim Kaine as governor and Jim Webb in the Senate. First, you have to pile up huge margins among liberal voters in the state's Democratic strongholds, most notably the inner suburbs of Northern Virginia, where Kaine captured more than 60 per cent of the vote in his race. (In the south-eastern part of the state, black voters are a major Democratic constituency; overall, African-Americans could account for close to a fifth of the statewide vote.) Next, you want to pull off wins in the exploding exurban counties in Northern Virginia and at least come close in the exurbs outside Richmond. Finally, in order to make the overall math work, you have to hold down your losses in the rural areas to the south and south-west. That probably means capturing at least 40 per cent in the economically devastated, gun-loving countryside that borders North Carolina and Tennessee to the south and Kentucky and West Virginia to the west.

Obama should have at least a good shot at achieving the first two of those objectives. His campaign says it is on pace to register as many as 200,000 new voters in reliably liberal parts of the state, and most analysts expect black voters to come to the polls in higher numbers for Obama than they have for other Democrats. For turnout, the campaign is relying on some 10,000 volunteers in the state, who are being trained to work in "neighbourhood teams" that go door to door registering and lobbying voters. Obama's campaign seems to have patterned its turnout effort after George W Bush's 2004 campaign, which employed a fervent volunteer network to churn out the suburban votes that put Ohio, among other states, into the Republican column.

In the mostly white exurbs, meanwhile, the economy alone should guarantee Obama a better hearing than Kerry could have expected. Like their counterparts in other states, young Virginians began moving into the exurbs over the last decade in search of something closer to their parents' version of the American dream. In the cities and suburbs where many of them grew up, housing prices were rising so rapidly that they couldn't afford to live in the towns with large lots and great schools. Farther out, however, in the brand-new exurbs that used to be farming towns, they found lower taxes, sprawling malls and affordable mini-mansions with driveways big enough for a couple of SUVs. For some Virginians, the extended commuting time to Richmond or Washington was worth the extra quality of life.

Perhaps no one is feeling as disoriented by the economic reversal of the past few years as these exurban voters, whose paradises are fast becoming prisons. They're watching as the value of their stocks and homes plummets, even as the cost of filling up the tank and heating the house soars. Traffic congestion along the state's main arteries has become a potent political issue, but fixing the problem requires more tax dollars. L Douglas Wilder, the former Virginia governor and now mayor of Richmond, has seen the desperation rise. "They're saying, 'I'm working as hard as I've ever worked in my life, but I can't save any money and I have to cut back, so what's gone wrong here?'" Wilder told me recently. "People who think they had it made – doctors, lawyers, engineers – everybody is feeling the pinch."

For a national Democrat, the hardest part of the electoral formula is probably the last piece – holding one's own in the sea of small towns in the southern and Appalachian regions of the state that are far more similar to the rest of the Deep South than they are to Virginia's northern counties. Voters here haven't known economic expansion in decades, and they seem to have decided long ago that neither party was especially serious about stopping the decline, or even knew how.

There is a strong sense in these communities, and not unreasonably, of suffering endless condescension – a feeling that urban America has already written off the rural lifestyle as a relic or, worse, as a joke. For that reason (and this is actually the point Obama says he was trying to make in San Francisco), cultural issues matter far more in the rural areas than they do in the exurbs, because voters see those issues as a test of whether politicians respect their values or mock them – a construct that Republican strategists have become expert at exploiting.

***

Democrats running for governor or the Senate can spend a lot more time shaking hands in these parts, working to distance themselves from the national party's smug image, than can a presidential candidate, who also has to carry all of the extra baggage of the party's stands on social issues – especially if he happens to be the first black nominee of either party. It probably isn't encouraging for Obama that in this year's Virginia primary, which he won easily, Hillary Clinton nonetheless dismantled him in the rural south-west. In tiny Dickenson County, along the western border with Kentucky, Clinton received 1,491 votes to Obama's 210. Next door in Wise County, it was Clinton 2,310; Obama 459.

Obama has responded to this challenge principally by doing precisely what he told me he had to do: he has shown up. The first thing he did as his party's presumptive nominee in June, two days after closing out the final primaries in South Dakota and Montana, was to get on a plane and come to Bristol, Virginia, on the Tennessee border. He has returned twice more since then to the southern part of the state, and his running mate Joe Biden recently headlined a mineworkers' rally there. Local Democrats told me that Obama's campaign office in the old manufacturing town of Danville was so unusual for a candidate of either party that its opening was treated almost as a curiosity, as if a smouldering meteor had smashed into the town green.

No Virginia Democrat knows more about how to win over white rural voters than Mark Warner, whose "Virginia story" is now legend for national Democrats. Running for governor in 2001, when Republicans had a virtual monopoly in Virginia, Warner visited the southern areas of the state dozens of times, promising to revive local economies by bringing broadband lines through the region and luring hi-tech companies.

He not only cut his losses in those remote counties; he carried many of them outright. His proudest achievement as governor, or at least the one he talks about with the most enthusiasm, came just weeks before the end of his term (Virginia is the last state in the union to limit its governors to one term), when he induced two large hi-tech companies to open facilities in the tiny south-western town of Lebanon, bringing more than 700 jobs with them.

When I asked Warner, who has campaigned with Obama, what Obama needed to say to earn the trust of rural Virginians, he suggested that Obama spend less time talking about economic despair and more time reminding voters of the hopeful things happening in southern Virginia.

"Celebrate Lebanon," he said. "Celebrate that we've got a place for your community in the 21st century." "Change" was a good slogan, Warner told me, and people surely wanted it, but you also had to give them a sense that you understood the challenges specific to their communities. "I'd like to hear him talk more about infrastructure, about broadband," Warner said. "I think he's still got to make the case that your kids shouldn't have to leave your hometown to find a world-class job.

"People make a judgement about whether you really care or not. Is it just a drive-by, or are you really going to invest?"

...how it works, ok?

The Electoral College consists of 538 popularly elected representatives who formally select the President and Vice President of the United States.[1] In 2008, it will make this selection on December 15. The Electoral College is an example of an indirect election.
Rather than directly voting for the President and Vice President, United States citizens cast votes for electors. Electors are technically free to vote for anyone eligible to be President, but in practice pledge to vote for specific candidates[2] and voters cast ballots for favored presidential and vice presidential candidates by voting for correspondingly pledged electors.[3] Most states allow voters to choose between statewide slates of electors pledged to vote for the presidential and vice presidential tickets of various parties; the ticket that receives the most votes statewide 'wins' all of the votes cast by electors from that state. U.S. presidential campaigns concentrate on winning the popular vote in a combination of states that choose a majority of the electors, rather than campaigning to win the most votes nationally.
Each state has a number of electors equal to the number of its Senators and Representatives in the United States Congress. Additionally, Washington, D.C. is given a number of electors equal to the number held by the smallest states.[4] U.S. territories are not represented in the Electoral College.

Each elector casts one vote for President and one vote for Vice President. In order to be elected, a candidate must have a majority (at least 270) of the electoral votes cast for that office. Should no candidate for President win a majority of the electoral votes, the choice is referred to the House of Representatives.[5] Should no candidate for Vice President possess a majority of the electoral votes, the choice is given to the Senate.[6]
The Constitution allows each state legislature to designate a method of choosing electors. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have adopted a winner-take-all popular vote rule where voters choose between statewide slates of electors pledged to vote for a specific presidential and vice presidential candidate. The candidate that wins the most votes in the state wins the support of all of that state’s electors. The two other states, Maine and Nebraska, use a tiered system where a single elector is chosen within each
Congressional district and two electors are chosen by statewide popular vote. U.S. presidential elections are effectively an amalgamation of 51 separate and simultaneous elections (50 states plus the District of Columbia), rather than a single national election.
Candidates can fail to get the most votes in the nationwide popular vote in a presidential election and still win that election. This occurred in 1876, 1888 and 2000. Critics argue the Electoral College is inherently undemocratic and gives certain swing states disproportionate clout in selecting the President and Vice President. Adherents argue that the Electoral College is an important and distinguishing feature of the federal system, and protects the rights of smaller states. Numerous constitutional amendments have been introduced in Congress seeking a replacement of the Electoral College with a direct popular vote; however, no proposal has ever successfully passed both houses.

Background
At the Constitutional Convention, the Virginia Plan used as the basis for discussions called for the Executive to be elected by the Legislature.[7] Delegates from a majority of states agreed to this mode of election.[8] However, a committee formed to work out various details, including the mode of election of the President, recommended instead that the election be by a group of people apportioned among the states in the same numbers as their representatives in Congress (the formula for which had been resolved in lengthy debates resulting in the Connecticut Compromise and Three-fifths compromise), but chosen by each state "in such manner as its Legislature may direct." Committee member Gouverneur Morris explained the reasons for the change; among others, there were fears of "intrigue" if the President was chosen by a small group of men who met together regularly, as well as concerns for the independence of the Office of the President.[9] Though some delegates preferred popular election, the committee's proposal was approved, with minor modifications, on September 6, 1787.[10]
In the Federalist Papers No. 39, James Madison argued that the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. The Congress would have two houses, one state-based (Senate) and the other population-based (House of Representatives) in character, while the President would be elected by a mixture of the two modes, giving some electoral power to the states and some to the people in general. Both the Congress and the President would be elected by mixed state-based and population-based means.[11]
Origin of name
The name Electoral College is not given in the United States Constitution, and it was not until the early 1800s that it came into general usage as the designation for the group of citizens selected to cast votes for President and Vice President. It was first written into Federal law in 1845, and today the term appears in 3 U.S.C. § 4, in the section heading and in the text as "college of electors."[12]
Original plan
Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution states:
“
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
”
Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 of the Constitution states:
“
The Congress may determine the Time of choosing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.
”
Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution provided for the original fashion by which the President and Vice President were to be chosen by the electors. The primary difference was that each elector voted for two Persons for President, rather than one vote for President and one vote for Vice President. After the choosing of the President, whoever had the most electoral votes, among the remaining candidates, would become the Vice President.
The design of the Electoral College was based upon several assumptions and anticipations of the Framers of the Constitution:
Each state would employ the district system of allocating electors.
Each presidential elector would exercise independent judgment when voting.
Candidates for either office would not pair together on the same ticket.
The system as designed would rarely produce a winner, thus sending the election to Congress.[13]
On these facts, scholars have described the intended role of the Electoral College as simply a body who would nominate candidates from which the Congress would then select a President and Vice President.[14]
However, the emergence of political parties and nationally coordinated election campaigns soon complicated matters in the elections of 1796 and 1800. In 1796, the winner of the election was John Adams, a member of the Federalist Party, and the runner up (and therefore the new Vice President) was Thomas Jefferson, a member of the opposition Democratic-Republican Party.
In 1800, the candidates of the Democratic-Republican Party (Jefferson for President and Aaron Burr for Vice President) each tied for first place. However, since all electoral votes were for President, Burr's votes were technically for him being President even though he was his party's second choice. Jefferson was so hated by Federalists that the party members sitting in Congress tried to elect Burr. The Congress deadlocked for 35 ballots as neither candidate received the necessary vote of a majority (nine) of the state delegations in the House. Only after Federalist Party leader Alexander Hamilton—who disliked Burr—made known his preference for Jefferson was the issue resolved on the 36th ballot.
In response to those elections, the Congress proposed the Twelfth Amendment—with electors casting one vote for President and one vote for Vice President—to replace the system outlined in Article II, Section 1, Clause 3. The Twelfth Amendment was proposed in 1803 and was adopted in 1804.
Electoral College mechanics


The constitutional theory behind the indirect election of both the President and Vice President of the United States is that while the Congress is popularly elected by the people,[15] the President and Vice President are elected to be executives of a federation of independent states.
Presidential electors are selected on a state-by-state basis, as determined by the laws of each state. Each state uses its statewide popular vote on Election Day to appoint electors (this was not the case for all states in the 18th and 19th century). Although ballots list the names of the presidential candidates, voters within the 50 states and Washington, D.C. actually choose electors for their state when they vote for President and Vice President. These presidential electors in turn cast electoral votes for those two offices. Even though the aggregate national popular vote is calculated by state officials and media organizations, the national popular vote is not the basis for electing a President or Vice President.
A candidate must receive an absolute majority of electoral votes (currently 270) to win the Presidency. If no candidate receives a majority in the election for President, or Vice President, that election is determined via a contingency procedure in the Twelfth Amendment, which is explained in detail below.
Apportionment of electors

The size of the Electoral College is equal to the total membership of both Houses of Congress (435 Representatives and 100 Senators) plus the three electors allocated to Washington, D.C., totaling 538 electors.
Each state is allocated as many electors as it has Representatives and Senators in the United States Congress.[16][17] Since the most populous states have the most seats in the House of Representatives, they also have the most electors. The six states with the most electors are California (55), Texas (34), New York (31), Florida (27), Illinois (21) and Pennsylvania (21). The seven smallest states by population—Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming—have three electors each. The number of representatives for each state is determined decennially by the United States Census, thus determining the number of electoral votes for each state until the next census reallocation.
Under the Twenty-third Amendment, Washington, D.C. is allocated as many electors as it would have if it were a state, but no more electors than the least populous state. The least populous state (Wyoming) has three electors; thus, D.C. cannot have more than three electors. Even if D.C. were a state, its current population would entitle it to three electors; based on its population per electoral vote, the District of Columbia has the second highest per-capita Electoral College representation, after Wyoming.[18]
Nomination of electors
Candidates for elector are nominated by their state political parties in the months prior to Election Day. The Constitution delegates to each state the authority for nominating and choosing its electors. In some states, the electors are nominated in primaries, the same way that other candidates are nominated. Other states, such as Oklahoma, Virginia, and North Carolina nominate electors in party conventions. In Pennsylvania, the campaign committees of each candidate name their candidates for presidential elector (an attempt to discourage faithless electors).
Disqualification of electors
Under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, no person holding a federal office, either elected or appointed, may become an elector.[19] Under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, any person who has sworn an oath to support the United States Constitution in order to hold either a state or federal office, and has then later rebelled against the United States, is barred from serving in the Electoral College. However, the Congress may remove this disability by a two-thirds vote in both Houses.
Election Day
Federal law sets the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November as the day for holding federal elections.[20]
The manner for choosing electors is determined within each state by its legislature.[21] Currently, all states choose electors by popular election on the date specified by federal law. While many people may believe they are voting for their presidential candidate, they are in actuality casting their vote for that candidate's electors.
Forty eight states, and Washington, D.C., employ the winner-takes-all method, each awarding its presidential electors as a single bloc. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, select one elector within each congressional district by popular vote, and additionally select the remaining two electors by the aggregate, statewide popular vote. This method has been used in Maine since 1972, and in Nebraska since 1992.
Meetings of electors
Electors chosen on Election Day meet in their respective state capitals (or in the case of Washington, D.C., within the District) on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, at which time they cast their electoral votes on separate ballots for President and Vice President. This year that meeting will be on December 15.
The Electoral College never meets as one body. Although procedures in each state vary slightly, the electors generally follow a similar series of steps, and the Congress has constitutional authority to regulate the procedures the states follow. The meeting is opened by the election certification official—often each state's Secretary of State or equivalent—who reads the Certificate of Ascertainment. This document sets forth who was chosen to cast the electoral votes. Those present answer to their name, and they then fill any vacancies in their number. The next step is the selection of a president or chairman of the meeting, sometimes also with a vice chairman. The electors sometimes choose a secretary, often not himself an elector, to take the minutes of the meeting. In many states, political officials give short speeches at this point in the proceedings.
When the time for balloting arrives, the electors choose one or two people to act as tellers. Some states provide for the placing in nomination of a candidate to receive the electoral votes (the candidate for President of the political party of the Electors). Each elector submits a written ballot with the name of a candidate for President. In New Jersey, the electors cast ballots by checking the name of the candidate on a pre-printed card; in North Carolina, the electors write the name of the candidate on a blank card. The tellers count the ballots and announce the result. The next step is the casting of the vote for Vice President, which follows a similar pattern.
After the voting is complete, the electors complete the Certificate of Vote. This document states the number of electoral votes cast for President and Vice President, and who received those votes. The state election official usually has pre-printed forms ready, and the tellers usually only write down the number of votes cast for appropriate candidates. Five copies of the Certificate of Vote are completed and signed by each Elector. Multiple copies of the Certificate of Vote are signed, in order to provide multiple originals in case one is lost. One copy is sent to President of the U.S. Senate (the sitting Vice President of the United States) by certified mail.
A staff member of the Office of the Vice President (here, acting in his capacity as President of the Senate) collects the Certificates of Vote as they arrive and prepares them for the joint session of Congress. The Certificates are arranged—unopened—in alphabetical order and placed in two special mahogany boxes. The states Alabama through Missouri (including Washington, D.C.) are placed in one box, and the states Montana through Wyoming are placed in the second box.
Faithless electors
A faithless elector is one who casts an electoral vote for someone other than whom they have pledged to elect, or who refuses to vote for any candidate. There are laws to punish faithless electors in 24 states. In 1952, the constitutionality of state pledge laws was brought before the Supreme Court in Ray v. Blair, 343 U.S. 214 (1952). The Court ruled in favor of state laws requiring electors to pledge to vote for the winning candidate, as well as removing electors who refuse to pledge. As stated in the ruling, electors are acting as a functionary of the state, not the federal government. Therefore, states have the right to govern electors. The constitutionality of state laws punishing electors for actually casting a faithless vote, rather than refusing to pledge, has never been decided by the Supreme Court. While many states may only punish a faithless elector after-the-fact, some such as Michigan specify that his or her vote shall be cancelled.[22]
As electoral slates are typically chosen by the political party or the party's presidential nominee, electors usually have high loyalty to the party and its candidate: a faithless elector runs a greater risk of party censure than criminal charges.
While not involving a "faithless elector" as such, there have been two instances in which a candidate died between the selection of the electors in November and the Electoral College vote in December. In the election of 1872, Democratic candidate Horace Greeley passed away before the meeting of the Electoral College; the electors who were to have voted for Greeley, finding themselves in a state of disarray, split their votes across several candidates, including three votes cast for the deceased Greeley. However, President Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican incumbent, had already won an absolute majority of electors. Because it was the death of a losing candidate, there was no pressure to agree on a replacement candidate. Similarly, in the election of 1912, after the Republicans had nominated incumbent President William Howard Taft and Vice President James S. Sherman, Sherman died shortly before the election, too late to change the names on the ballot, thus causing Sherman to be listed posthumously. That ticket finished third behind the Democrats (Woodrow Wilson) and the Progressives (Theodore Roosevelt), and the eight electoral votes that Sherman would have received were cast instead for Nicholas M. Butler. Electors pledged to a dead candidate are free to vote for whomever they wish just as electors pledged to a live candidate are.
Faithless electors have not changed the outcome of a presidential election in any election to date. For example, in 2000 elector Barbara Lett Simmons of Washington D.C. chose not to vote, rather than voting for Al Gore as she had pledged to do. This was done as an act of protest against Washington, D.C.'s lack of Congressional representation.[23] That elector's abstention did not change who won that year's presidential election, as George W. Bush received a majority (271) of the electoral votes.
Joint session of Congress and the contingent election
The Twelfth Amendment mandates that the Congress assemble in joint session.[24] Additionally, federal law mandates that such joint session to count the electoral votes and declare the winners of the election take place on the sixth day of January in the calendar year immediately following the meetings of the presidential electors.[25] The meeting is held at 1:00 p.m. in the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. The sitting Vice President is expected to preside, but in several cases the President pro tempore of the Senate has chaired the proceedings instead. The Vice President and the Speaker of the House sit at the podium, with the Vice President in the seat of the Speaker of the House. Senate pages bring in the two mahogany boxes containing each state's certified vote and place them on tables in front of the Senators and Representatives. Each house appoints two tellers to count the vote. Relevant portions of the Certificate of Vote are read for each state, in alphabetical order. If there are no objections, the presiding officer declares the result of the vote and, if applicable, states who is elected President and Vice President. The Senators then depart from the House Chamber.
Contingent presidential election by House
Pursuant to the Twelfth Amendment, the House of Representatives is required to go into session immediately to vote for President if no candidate for President receives a majority (270 votes) of the 538 electoral votes.
In this event, the House of Representatives is limited to choosing from among the three candidates who received the most electoral votes. Each state delegation has a single vote. To be elected, a candidate must receive an absolute majority of state votes (currently 26) in order for that candidate to become the President-elect. Additionally, delegations from at least two-thirds of all the states must be present for voting to take place. The House continues balloting until it elects a President.
The House of Representatives has chosen the President only twice: once under Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 (in 1801) and once under the Twelfth Amendment (in 1825).
Contingent vice presidential election by Senate
If no candidate for Vice President receives an absolute majority of electoral votes, then the Senate must go into session to elect a Vice President. The Senate is limited to choosing from only the top two candidates to have received electoral votes (one fewer than the number to which the House is limited). The Senate votes in the normal manner in this case (i.e., ballots are individually cast by each Senator, and not by State delegations). However, two-thirds of the Senators must be present for voting to take place.
Additionally, the Twelfth Amendment states that a "majority of the whole number" of Senators (currently 51 of 100) is necessary for election. [26] The Constitution is not explicit about whether the President of the Senate can vote to break a tie, and legal scholars differ on the point.[27] Nevertheless, the absence or abstention of one or more Senators would easily render the point moot.[28]
The only time the Senate chose the Vice President was in 1837. In that instance, the Senate adopted an alphabetical role call and voting viva voce. The rules further stated, "[I]f a majority of the number of Senators shall vote for either the said Richard M. Johnson or Francis Granger, he shall be declared by the presiding officer of the Senate constitutionally elected Vice President of the United States..."[29]
Deadlocked chambers
If the House of Representatives has not chosen a President-elect in time for the inauguration (noon on January 20), then Section 3 of the Twentieth Amendment specifies that the Vice President-elect becomes Acting President until the House should select a President. If the winner of the vice presidential election is also not known by then, then under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the sitting Speaker of the House would become Acting President until either the House should select a President or the Senate should select a Vice President.
Alternative methods of choosing electors
The current system of choosing presidential electors is called the short ballot. In all states, voters choose among slates of candidates for the associated elector; only a few states list the names of the presidential electors on the ballot. In some states, if a voter wishes to write in a candidate for president, the voter also is required to write-in the names of candidates for elector.
Before the advent of the short ballot in the early twentieth century, the most common means of electing the presidential electors was through the general ticket. The general ticket is quite similar to the current system and is often confused with it. In the general ticket, voters cast ballots for individuals running for presidential elector (while in the short ballot, voters cast ballots for an entire slate of electors). In the general ticket, the state canvass would report the number of votes cast for each candidate for elector, a complicated process in states like New York with multiple positions to fill. Both the general ticket and the short ballot are often considered at-large or winner-takes-all voting. The short ballot was adopted by the various states at different times; it was adopted for use by North Carolina and Ohio in 1932. Alabama was still using the general ticket as late as 1960 and was one of the last states to switch to the short ballot.
The question of the extent to which state constitutions may constrain the legislature's choice of a method of choosing electors has been touched on in two U.S. Supreme Court cases. In McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U.S. 1 (1892), the Court cited Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 which states that a state's electors are selected "in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct" and wrote that these words "operat[e] as a limitation upon the state in respect of any attempt to circumscribe the legislative power." In Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, 531 U.S. 70 (2000), a Florida Supreme Court decision was vacated (not reversed) based on McPherson. On the other hand, three justices, dissenting in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), wrote that "nothing in Article II of the Federal Constitution frees the state legislature from the constraints in the State Constitution that created it."[30]
Appointment by state legislature


Another method of choosing electors is selection by the state legislature. It was used by a majority of the states in both 1792 and 1800, and half of the states in 1812. One of the reasons that most United States history textbooks don't start reporting the popular vote until the election of 1824 is because more than a quarter of all the states used legislative choice in all prior elections; there simply was no popular vote in those states. Even in 1824, when Andrew Jackson famously accused John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay of a corrupt bargain because he lost in spite of having pluralities of both the popular and electoral votes, a full quarter of the states (6 of 24) did not hold popular elections for President and Vice President; instead, those six state legislatures choose the electors that year. By the following election, only Delaware and South Carolina continued to use legislative choice. Delaware ended its practice the following election (1832). South Carolina held on to legislative choice until it became the first state to secede in December 1860.
Legislative appointment made three more appearances on the electoral stage: first, in 1864, Nevada, having been made a state only a few days previously, had no choice but to appoint. Then, in 1868, the newly reconstructed state of Florida appointed its electors, having been readmitted too late to hold elections. Finally, in 1876, the legislature of the newly admitted state of Colorado used legislative choice due to a lack of time and money to hold an election. It was also a possibility in the 2000 election. Had the recounts continued, the Florida legislature was prepared to appoint the Republican slate of electors to avoid missing the federal deadline for choosing electors.
The Constitution gives the power to the state legislatures to decide how electors are chosen, and it is easier and cheaper for a state legislature to simply appoint a slate of electors than to create a legislative framework for holding elections to determine the electors. As noted above, the two situations in which legislative choice has been used since the Civil War have both been because there was not enough time or money to prepare for an election. However, appointment by state legislature has a serious flaw: legislatures can deadlock more easily than the electorate. In fact, this is precisely what happened in 1789, when New York failed to appoint any electors.
Electoral districts


Another method for choosing electors is to divide a state into electoral districts, and the voters of each district choose a single elector, much as states are currently divided into Congressional districts for choosing Representatives. Electoral districts could not correspond with Congressional districts, unless two of that state's electors were chosen differently (just as Senators are elected unrelated to Congressional districts). As with Congressional districts, moreover, this method is vulnerable to gerrymandering.
States which have used electoral districting and the years used:
Illinois: 1820, 1824.
Kentucky: 1792, 1796, 1800, 1804, 1808, 1812, 1816, 1820, 1824.
Maryland: 1796, 1800, 1804, 1808, 1812, 1816, 1820, 1824, 1828, 1832.
Michigan: 1892.
Missouri: 1824.
North Carolina: 1796, 1800, 1804, 1808.
Tennessee: 1804, 1808, 1812, 1816, 1820, 1824, 1828.
Virginia: 1789, 1792, 1796.
Congressional District Method
The Congressional District Method (a.k.a., Maine-Nebraska Method) is an alternative way of distributing electoral votes within a state. In the winner take all system the popular vote winner of the statewide vote receives all of that state’s electoral votes. In the Congressional District Method the Electoral votes are distributed based on the popular vote winner of each of the state’s individual Congressional districts, with the statewide popular vote winner receiving two additional electoral votes.[31]
The number of electoral votes allocated to each state is equal to the number of representatives the state has in the Congress.[32] The two votes that a candidate receives for winning the statewide popular vote come from the two electoral votes that each state receives from the members in the Senate to which each state is entitled. The other electoral votes that a state has come from the respective number of members of the House of Representatives to which each state is entitled.
Currently only two states, Maine and Nebraska, use the Congressional District Method for distributing their electoral votes. Maine has four electoral votes based on its two Representatives and two Senators. In Nebraska there are two Senators and three Representatives giving it five electoral votes.[33]
The Congressional District Method was first used by Massachusetts in the elections of 1804, 1812, and 1820. After seceding from Massachusetts, Maine used this method through the election of 1828.[34] Maine resumed using the Congressional District Method in the election of 1972. Nebraska has used the Congressional District Method since the election of 1992.[35][36]
The Congressional District Method allows for the chance for states to split their electoral vote between multiple candidates. However, even though Maine and Nebraska have been using the method for twenty-six and sixteen years respectively neither has ever split its electoral vote, probably in part because of the small number of electoral districts.[31] If states with more Representatives used this method, split electoral votes would be more likely to occur.
The Congressional District Method is closer to one man, one vote than the current winner-take-all system because an individual's vote has a larger weight to it.[37] In addition, the Congressional District Method can be more easily implemented than other alternatives to the winner-take-all method. Each state only has to pass legislation in order to use the new method, instead of having to pass a constitutional amendment like some other Electoral College reform options.[37] The Congressional District Method has its benefits, but there are also criticisms of it. For instance, candidates might only spend time in certain battleground districts instead of the entire state, and cases of gerrymandering Congressional districts could be exacerbated with political parties trying to draw up as many safe districts as they can.[38]
Proportional vote
Under such a system, electors would be selected in proportion to the votes cast for their candidate or party, rather than being selected by the statewide plurality vote.[39]
Contemporary conflict over the Electoral College



Claims against the Electoral College
Irrelevancy of national popular vote


This graphic demonstrates how the winner of the popular vote can still lose in a hypothetical electoral college system.
In the elections of 1876, 1888, and 2000, the candidate receiving the plurality of the nationwide popular vote did not become President.[40] Opponents of the Electoral College submit that such outcomes do not logically follow the normative concept of how a democratic system should function.
Outcomes of this sort are attributable to the federal nature of the system. As such, argue supporters of the Electoral College, candidates must build a popular base that is geographically broader and more diverse in voter interests.
Scenarios exhibiting this outcome typically result when the winning candidate has won the requisite configuration of states (and thus their votes) by small margins while his opponent captured large voter margins in the remaining states. Given the 2000 allocation of electors, it is possible a candidate could win with only the hair's width support of the 11 largest states. In such an example, the very large margins secured by the losing candidate in the other states would aggregate to well over 50 percent of the ballots cast nationally. Claims that the Electoral College suppresses the "popular will" are therefore open to debate.
A result of the present functionality of the Electoral College is that the national popular vote bears no legal or factual significance on determining the outcome of the election. Since the national popular vote is irrelevant, both voters and candidates are assumed to base their campaign strategies around the existence of the Electoral College; any close race has candidates campaigning to maximize electoral votes by capturing coveted swing states, not to maximize national popular vote totals.
Focus on large swing states


These maps show the amount of attention given to each state by the Bush and Kerry campaigns during the final five weeks of the 2004 election. At left, each waving hand represents a visit from a presidential or vice-presidential candidate during the final five weeks. At right, each dollar sign represents one million dollars spent on TV advertising by the campaigns during the same time period.
Most states use a winner-take-all system, in which the candidate with the most votes in that state receives all of the state's electoral votes. This gives candidates an incentive to pay the most attention to states without a clear favorite, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. For example, California, Texas, and New York, in spite of having the largest populations, have in recent elections been considered safe for a particular party (Democratic for California and New York; Republican for Texas), and therefore candidates typically devote relatively few resources, in both time and money, to such states.
It is possible to win the election by winning eleven states and disregarding the rest of the country. If one ticket were to take California (55 votes), Texas (34), New York (31), Florida (27) Illinois (21), Pennsylvania (21), Ohio (20), Michigan (17), Georgia (15), New Jersey (15), and North Carolina (15), that ticket would have 271 votes, which would be enough to win. In the close elections of 2000 and 2004, these eleven states gave 111 votes to Republican candidate George W. Bush and 160 votes to Democratic candidates Al Gore and John Kerry.
Proponents of the Electoral College claim that adoption of the popular vote would simply shift the disproportionate focus to large cities at the expense of rural areas.[41] Candidates might also be inclined to campaign hardest in their base areas to maximize turnout among core supporters, and ignore more closely divided parts of the country. Whether such developments would be good or bad is a matter of normative political theory and political interests of the voters in question.
Discourages turnout and participation
Because it does not matter how many people turn out to vote in a given state, the Electoral College eliminates any advantage to a political party or campaign for encouraging voters to turn out (except in the few closely fought swing states).[42] If the presidential election were decided by a national popular vote, in contrast, campaigns and parties would have a strong incentive to work to increase turnout everywhere.[43] Individuals would similarly have a strong incentive to persuade their friends and neighbors to turn out to vote. The differences in turnout between swing states and non-swing states under the current Electoral College system suggest that replacing the Electoral College with direct election by popular vote would likely increase turnout and participation very significantly.[42]
Allows states to disenfranchise citizens without penalty
If a state makes it harder for its citizens to vote, whether by making voting more difficult or expensive, or by legally disenfranchising some citizens (such as ex-felons) from voting, and turnout in the state is reduced as a result, the Electoral College insulates the state from being penalized. In fact, legal scholars Akhil Amar and Vikram Amar point out that the original compromise of the Electoral College was largely due to this very fact. Direct national election of the President (which was proposed by a delegate from Pennsylvania) would have enabled the North to outvote the South, because "the South would get no credit for its half-million slaves, none of whom, of course, would be able to vote. The Electoral College system that ultimately emerged gave the South partial -- three-fifths -- credit for its slaves."[44] The Electoral College compromise thus allowed states to disenfranchise large numbers of citizens while maintaining the same influence in the Electoral College. Amar and Amar note, "The founders' system also encouraged the continued disenfranchisement of women. In a direct national election system, any state that gave women the vote would automatically have doubled its national clout. Under the Electoral College, however, a state had no such incentive to increase the franchise; as with slaves, what mattered was how many women lived in a state, not how many were empowered."[45] The Electoral College continues to insulate states from losing any influence when they disenfranchise or suppress the votes of their citizens -- whether through voter suppression, through making it more difficult or expensive to vote, or through actually taking away some citizens' votes by law. "Even today, a state with low voter turnout gets precisely the same number of electoral votes as if it had a high turnout. By contrast, a well-designed direct election system could spur states to get out the vote."[45]
Favors less populous states
As a consequence of giving more per capita voting power to the less populated states, the Electoral College gives disproportionate power to those states' interests. Since each state (except, in some cases, Maine and Nebraska) casts all of its Electoral College votes for either the Republicans or the Democrats, Democrats often assert that the Electoral College system favors the Republican Party by disproportionately boosting the electoral weight of the less populous states, which have tended historically to vote Republican. Attempts have been made to show otherwise using game theory analysis, and specifically using the Banzhaf Power Index (BPI). In this model, individual voters in California (highest electoral vote count) had approximately 3.3 times more individual power to choose a President as voters of Montana (highest population with the minimum 3 electors) in 1990.[46] However, Banzhaf's analysis has been critiqued as treating votes like coin-flips, and more empirically-based models of voting yield results which seem to favor larger states less.[47]
Disadvantage for third parties
In practice, the winner-take-all manner of allocating a state's electors generally decreases the importance of minor parties.[48]
Claims in favor of the Electoral College
Prevents an urban-centric victory
Proponents of the Electoral College claim the Electoral College prevents a candidate from winning the Presidency by simply winning in heavily populated urban areas. This means that candidates must make a much wider appeal than they would if they simply had to win the national popular vote.[49]
Maintains the federal character of the nation
The United States of America is a federal coalition which consists of component states. Proponents of the current system argue that the collective opinion of even a small state merits attention at the federal level greater than that given to a small, though numerically-equivalent, portion of a very populous state. The system also allows each state the freedom, within constitutional bounds, to design its own laws on voting and enfranchisement without an undue incentive to maximize the number of votes cast.
For many years early in the nation's history, up until the Jacksonian Era, many states appointed their electors by a vote of the state legislature, and proponents argue that, in the end, the election of the President must still come down to the decisions of each state, or the federal nature of the United States will give way to a single massive, centralized government.[50]
Enhances status of minority groups
Far from decreasing the power of minority groups by depressing voter turnout, proponents argue that, by making the votes of a given state an all-or-nothing affair, minority groups can provide the critical edge that allows a candidate to win. This encourages candidates to court a wide variety of such minorities and special interests.[50] This argument does not apply to states that do not employ an all-or-nothing system, for selecting their electors, Maine and Nebraska being the only such states at this time; the argument does apply to individual electors.
Encourages stability through the two-party system
Many proponents of the Electoral College see its negative effect on third parties as a good thing. They argue that the two party system has provided stability through its ability to change during times of rapid political and cultural change. They believe it protects the most powerful office in the country from control by what these proponents view as regional minorities until they can moderate their views to win broad, long-term support from across the entire nation.
Death or unsuitability of a candidate
The U.S. constitution grants each state the right to appoint electors in a manner chosen by that state. While it is common to think of the electoral votes impersonally, as mere numbers, the college is in fact made up of real people (usually party regulars of the party whose candidate wins each state) with the capacity to adapt to unusual situations. That capacity might be particularly important if, for example, a candidate were to die or become in some other way unsuitable to serve as President or Vice President. Advocates of the current system argue that these electors could then choose a suitable replacement (who would most likely come from the same party of the candidate who won the election) more competently than could the general voting public. Furthermore, the time period during which such a death or the onset of such an unsuitability might call for such an adaptation extends, under the Electoral College system, from before Election Day (many states cannot change ballots at a late stage) until the day the electors vote (the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December). Thus, until the electors cast their votes, it is not a federal issue, per se, but a state's rights issue and state laws (should) regulate the situation. In Virginia, for instance, the law clearly states that the electors must vote for the name of the candidate who they represent on the ballot and therefore these electors are not able to adapt to unusual situations.
In the election of 1872, Democratic candidate Horace Greeley did in fact die before the meeting of the Electoral College, resulting in Democratic disarray; the electors who were to have voted for Greeley split their votes across several candidates, including three votes cast for the deceased Greeley. However, President Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican incumbent, had already won an absolute majority of electors. Because it was the death of a losing candidate, there was no pressure to agree on a replacement candidate. There has never been a case of a candidate of the winning party dying.
In the election of 1912, after the Republicans had renominated President Taft and Vice President Sherman, Sherman died shortly before the election, too late to change the names on the ballot, thus causing Sherman to be listed posthumously. That ticket finished third behind the Democrats (Woodrow Wilson) and the Progressives (Theodore Roosevelt), and the 8 electoral votes that Sherman would have received were cast for Nicholas M. Butler.
Isolation of election problems
Some supporters of the Electoral College note that it isolates the impact of potential election fraud or other problems to the state where it occurs. The College prevents instances where a party dominant in one state may dishonestly inflate the votes for a candidate and thereby affect the election outcome. Recounts, for instance, occur only on a state-by-state basis, not nationwide. Similarly, the College acts to isolate less malicious election problems to the state in which they occur.[51]
Neutralizes turnout disparities between states
There are factors that affect the turnout around the country. Weather can vary greatly across a large nation, rain or winter storms can impact voter participation in affected states. In addition, when a state has another high profile contest, such as a hotly contested Senate or gubernatorial race, turnout in that state can be affected. Because the allocation of electoral votes is independent of each state's turnout, the Electoral College neutralizes the effect of all such turnout disparities between states.
Maintains separation of powers
The Constitution separated government into three branches that check each other to minimize threats to liberty and encourage deliberation of governmental acts. Under the original framework, only members of the House of Representatives were directly elected by the people, with members of the Senate chosen by state legislatures, the President by the Electoral College, and the judiciary by the President and the Senate. The President was not directly elected in part due to fears that he could assert a national popular mandate that would undermine the legitimacy of the other branches, and potentially result in tyranny.
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
This proposal, also known as the Amar Plan, calls for an interstate compact whereby individual states agree to allocate their electors to the winner of the national popular vote. The state legislatures of the joining states would then establish a direct election, thereby effectively circumventing the Electoral College, when they collectively have a majority (at least 270) of the electoral votes. The proposal is still 220 electoral votes short of going into effect.
The proposal centers on Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, which gives each state legislature the authority to determine how its state's electors are to be chosen. Many partial versions of this plan have emerged over the years.
While the power of each State to determine how it chooses its electors is clearly plenary, what remains unclear is whether such coordination between the States requires the approval of the Congress, pursuant to the Compact Clause of the Constitution, before this compact can take effect.
Currently, four states have joined the compact. The first was Maryland, where Governor Martin O'Malley signed the bill into law on April 10, 2007.[52] New Jersey joined on January 13, 2008, despite objections from Republicans who criticized the bill as undermining federal elections.[53] Illinois passed the law on April 7, 2008 [54] and was followed by Hawaii on May 1, where the legislature overrode a veto from Governor Linda Lingle.[55]
The Bayh-Celler Amendment
The closest the nation has ever come to abolishing the Electoral College occurred during the 91st Congress.[56] The presidential election of 1968 had ended with Richard Nixon receiving 301 electoral votes to Hubert Humphrey's 191. Yet, Nixon had only received 511,944 more popular votes than Humphrey, equating to less than 1% of the national total. George Wallace received the remaining 46 electoral votes with only 13.5% of the popular vote.[57]
Representative Emanuel Celler, Chairman of the US House of Representative's Judiciary Committee responded to public concerns over the disparity between the popular vote and electoral vote by introducing House Joint Resolution 681, an Amendment to the United States Constitution which would have abolished the Electoral College and replaced it with a system wherein the pair of candidates who won at least 40% of the national popular vote would win the Presidency and Vice Presidency respectively. If no pair received 40% of the popular vote, a runoff election would be held in which the choice of President and Vice President would be made from the two pairs of persons who had received the highest number of votes in the first election. The word "pair" was defined as "two persons who shall have consented to the joining of their names as candidates for the offices of President and Vice President."[58]
On April 29, 1969, the House Judiciary Committee voted favorably, 28–6, to approve the Amendment.[59] Debate on the proposed Amendment before the full House of Representatives ended on September 11, 1969,[60] and was eventually passed with bipartisan support on September 18, 1969, being approved by a vote of 339 to 70.[61]
On September 30, 1969, President Richard Nixon gave his endorsement for adoption of the proposal, encouraging the Senate to pass its version of the Amendment which had been sponsored as Senate Joint Resolution 1, by Senator Birch Bayh.[62]
In its October 8, 1969 edition, the New York Times reported that the legislatures of 30 states were "either certain or likely to approve a constitutional amendment embodying the direct election plan if it passes its final Congressional test in the Senate." Ratification of 38 state legislatures would have been needed for passage. The paper also reported that 6 other states had yet to state a preference, 6 were leaning toward opposition and 8 were solidly opposed.[63]
On August 14, 1970, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent its report advocating passage of the Amendment to the full Senate. The Judiciary Committee had approved the proposal by a vote of 11 to 6. The six members who opposed the plan, Democratic Senators James Eastland of Mississippi, John Little McClellan of Arkansas and Sam Ervin of North Carolina along with Republican Senators Roman Hruska of Nebraska, Hiram Fong of Hawaii and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, all argued that although the present system had potential loopholes, it had worked well throughout the years. Senator Bayh would indicate that supporters of the measure were about a dozen votes shy from the 67 needed for the Amendment to pass the full Senate. He called upon President Nixon to attempt to persuade undecided Republican Senators to support the plan.[64] However, Nixon, while not reneging on his previous endorsement, chose not to make any further personal appeals to back the legislation.[65]
Open debate on the Amendment finally reached the Senate floor on Tuesday, September 8, 1970,[66] but was quickly faced with a filibuster. The lead objectors to the Amendment were mostly Southern Senators and conservatives from small states, both Democrats and Republicans, who argued abolishing the Electoral College would reduce their states' political influence.[65]
On September 17, 1970, a motion for cloture, which would have ended the filibuster, failed to receive the 67 votes, or two-thirds of those Senators voting, necessary to pass.[67] The vote was 54 to 36 in favor of the motion.[68] A second motion for cloture was held on September 29, 1970, this time failing 53 to 34, or five votes short of the required two-thirds. Thereafter, the Senate Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, moved to lay the Amendment aside so that the Senate could attend to other business.[69] However, the Amendment was never considered again and died when the 91st Congress officially ended on January 3, 1971.
The District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act
Legislation in the Congress (H.R. 1905 and S. 1257) regarding a Representative for Washington, D.C. would increase the size of the House to 437 members. One of the two new seats would go to Washington, D.C. and the other would go to the State of Utah per the 2000 U.S. Census apportionment.
The additional seat to Utah would increase its House delegation to four, consequently increasing its number of Electoral College votes to six. As Washington, D.C. is already given three Electoral College votes by the Twenty-third Amendment, receiving a House seat would neither increase nor decrease its share of the Electoral College.
If the proposed legislation becomes law, and survives any challenges to its constitutionality, the total number of Electoral votes would increase by one to 539. The majority needed to elect a President would remain 270 electoral votes.
On April 19, 2007 the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1905 by a vote of 241 in favor, 177 against, 1 present (i.e. abstained).[70] On September 18, 2007 the Senate fell three votes short of passing a motion to invoke Cloture regarding S. 1257 (60 votes needed to invoke Cloture).[71]
Electoral vote distribution
The following table shows the number of electoral votes to which each state and the District of Columbia is entitled during the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections:[72][73]
State
Electoral Votes
State
Electoral Votes
Alabama
9
Montana
3
Alaska
3
Nebraska
5**
Arizona
10
Nevada
5
Arkansas
6
New Hampshire
4
California
55
New Jersey
15
Colorado
9
New Mexico
5
Connecticut
7
New York
31
Delaware
3
North Carolina
15
Washington, D.C.*
3
North Dakota
3
Florida
27
Ohio
20
Georgia
15
Oklahoma
7
Hawaii
4
Oregon
7
Idaho
4
Pennsylvania
21
Illinois
21
Rhode Island
4
Indiana
11
South Carolina
8
Iowa
7
South Dakota
3
Kansas
6
Tennessee
11
Kentucky
8
Texas
34
Louisiana
9
Utah
5
Maine
4**
Vermont
3
Maryland
10
Virginia
13
Massachusetts
12
Washington
11
Michigan
17
West Virginia
5
Minnesota
10
Wisconsin
10
Mississippi
6
Wyoming
3
Missouri
11
Total electors
538
* Washington, D.C., although not a state, is granted three electoral votes by the Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution.
** Maine and Nebraska electors distributed by way of the Congressional District Method.
Notes
^ The number of electors is equal to the total membership of the United States Congress (composed of 435 Representatives and 100 Senators) plus three electors from the District of Columbia. See Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution and the Twenty third Amendment
^ Electors are not required by federal law to honor a pledge, however in the overwhelming majority of cases they do vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. Additionally many states have laws designed to ensure that electors vote for pledged candidates. See The Green Papers
^ This process has been normalized to the point that the names of the electors appear on the ballot only in a handful of states. See The Green Papers
^ Currently Wyoming, which has three electors. The Twenty third Amendment also stipulates the District cannot have more electoral votes than the smallest state, making it highly unlikely the District will ever have more than three votes.
^ The House must choose from the three presidential candidates with the most electoral votes. When the House selects the President, the delegation from each state casts a single vote (meaning that California's 53 representatives collectively have as much clout as Wyoming's lone Congressman). A candidate must win the votes of a majority of state delegations in order to be named President (see the Twelfth Amendment.
^ The Senate must choose from the two candidates with the most electoral votes. Votes are taken in the normal manner. The new Vice President serves as Acting President should the House fail to choose a President by Inauguration Day (see Section 3 of the Twentieth Amendment).
^ Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787: May 29
^ Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787: June 2
^ Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787: September 4
^ Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787: September 6
^ The Federalist #39
^ Federal Register
^ Chang, Stanley (2007). "Updating the Electoral College: The National Popular Vote Legislation". Harvard Journal on Legislation 44 (205, at 208). Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College.
^ Berg-Andersson, Richard E. (September 17, 2000), "What Are They All Doing, Anyway?: An Historical Analysis of the Electoral College", The Green Papers, <http://www.thegreenpapers.com/Hx/ElectoralCollege.html>
^ Prior to the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, this only meant the House of Representatives.
^ The present allotment of electors by state is shown in the Electoral vote distribution section.
^ The number of electors allocated to each state is based on Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution.
^ 2006 Census estimates
^ Sabrina Eaton (October 29, 2004). "Brown learns he can't serve as Kerry elector, steps down" (PDF), Cleveland Plain Dealer (reprint at Edison Research). Retrieved on 2008-01-03.
^ 3 U.S.C. § 1 A uniform national date for presidential elections was not set until 1845, although Congress always had constitutional authority to do so. — Kimberling, William C. (1992) The Electoral College, p. 7
^ United States Constitution, Article II, Section 1.: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
^ Michigan Election Law Section 168.47
^ The Green Papers
^ "The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted."
^ 3 U.S. Code, Chapter 1
^ RL30804: The Electoral College: An Overview and Analysis of Reform Proposals, L. Paige Whitaker and Thomas H. Neale, January 16, 2001
^ "Election evolves into 'perfect' electoral storm". USA Today (December 12, 2000). Retrieved on September 20, 2008.
^ This follows as a mathematical deduction. If at least one Senator does not vote, a tie means that fewer than half of the Senators voted for either candidate. A tie-breaker would leave the vote-leader with a vote total no more than half the number of Senators, which is insufficient for election.
^ Senate Journal from 1837
^ Bush v. Gore, (Justice Stevens dissenting) (quote in second paragraph)
^ a b http://www.fandm.edu/x6441.xml
^ The Electoral College: How It Works in Contemporary Presidential Elections
^ President Elect - Articles - Upgrading The College
^ United States Electoral College
^ Methods of Choosing Presidential Electors
^ "Nebraska's Vote Change." (April 7, 1991) The Washington Post
^ a b http://www.dos.state.pa.us/election_reform/lib/election_reform/Electoral_College_Reform.pdf
^ The Electoral College - Reform Options
^ FairVote
^ In 1824, there were six states in which electors were legislatively appointed rather than being popularly elected, so the true popular vote is uncertain. With no candidate having received a majority of electoral votes in 1824, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, and is thus distinct from the latter three elections in which a single candidate won by an Electoral College majority.
^ Hands Off the Electoral College by Rep. Ron Paul, MD, December 28, 2004
^ a b Nivola, Pietro (January 2005), Thinking About Political Polarization, <http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2005/01politics_nivola.aspx>
^ Koza et al., John (2006), Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote, p. xvii, <http://www.every-vote-equal.com/files/Every-Vote-Equal.pdf>
^ Amar, Akhil & Amar, Vikram (September 9, 2004), "The Electoral College Votes Against Equality", Los Angeles Times, <http://www.law.yale.edu/news/2091.htm>
^ a b Amar, Akhil & Amar, Vikram (September 9, 2004), "The Electoral College Votes Against Equality", Los Angeles Times, <http://www.law.yale.edu/news/2091.htm>
^ Mark Livingston, Department of Computer Science. "Banzhaf Power Index". University of North Carolina.
^ Gelman, Andrew & Katz, Jonathan (2002), "The Mathematics and Statistics of Voting Power", Statistical Science 17(4): 420–435, doi:10.1214/ss/1049993201, <http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/STS027.pdf>
^ Third Parties? by Jerry Fresia, February 28, 2006
^ Why the Electoral College, P. Andrew Sandlin, December 13, 2000
^ a b Kimberling, William C. (May 1992). "The Electoral College" (PDF). Federal Election Commission. Retrieved on 2008-01-03.
^ http://www.psych.cornell.edu/Darlington/electorl.htm
^ Dropping out of the electoral college, CNN.COM, April 10, 2007
^ "Trenton: State Backs Electoral College Change", New York Times, January 14, 2008, Page B5
^ About Governor Blagojevich's signing of HB 1685.
^ About veto override in Hawaii
^ For a more detailed account of this proposal read The Politics of Electoral College Reform by Lawrence D. Longley and Alan G. Braun (1972)
^ 1968 Electoral College Results, National Archives and Records Administration
^ "Text of Proposed Amendment on Voting", The New York Times, April 30, 1969, page 21
^ "House Unit Votes To Drop Electors" The New York Times, April 30, 1969, page 1
^ "Direct Election of President Is Gaining in the House", The New York Times, September 12, 1969, page 12
^ "House Approves Direct Election of The President," The New York Times, September 19, 1969, page 1
^ "Nixon Comes Out For Direct Vote On Presidency," The New York Times, October 1, 1969, page 1
^ "A Survey Finds 30 Legislatures Favor Direct Vote For President," The New York Times, October 8, 1969, page 1
^ "Bayh Calls for Nixon's Support As Senate Gets Electoral Plan", The New York Times, August 15, 1970, page 11
^ a b "Senate Refuses To Halt Debate On Direct Voting," The New York Times, September 18, 1970, page 1
^ "Senate Debating Direct Election", The New York Times, September 9, 1970, page 10
^ The Senate reduced the required vote from two-thirds to three-fifths (i.e., 60 vote). See United States Senate website.
^ "Senate Refuses to Halt Debate On Direct Voting," The New York Times, September 18, 1970, page 1
^ "Senate Puts Off Direct Vote Plan," The New York Times, September 30, 1970, page 1
^ Breakdown of House vote on H.R. 1905
^ Breakdown of Senate vote on Cloture motion
^ U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
^ Prior to the 2012 election, each state's electoral vote total may be changed based on the results of the 2010 Census and the subsequent congressional re-apportionment.
Electoral College map showing the results of the 2004 US presidential election. President George W. Bush won the popular vote in 31 states (denoted in red) with 286 electoral votes. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won the popular vote in 19 states and the District of Columbia (denoted in blue) and 251 electoral votes. A Minnesota elector cast his presidential and vice presidential votes for Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. Since the 2000 election it has become customary for states won by Democratic candidates to be colored blue and states won by Republican candidates to be colored red on Electoral College maps